


If Talking Were Effective, Yelling Would Be Academic

by karanguni



Series: Nasdack [15]
Category: FFVII, FFXII
Genre: Multi, Stockmarket AU, real world AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-07-07
Updated: 2011-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 04:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rufus, Enfant Terrifying. Since it would be bad advice to tell any of them to talk things out, Rufus opts for alternatives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If Talking Were Effective, Yelling Would Be Academic

It starts because of one of those failures in non-communication that are so rare between Rufus and Tseng. They're not used to not talking; it's a fact of life that they talk to each other all the time, they talk to each other too much, they talk like they want each other to stop talking altogether. Rufus, during his less generous moments of self-evisceration, thinks that they talk like two people out of counselling. They're always on record, and they have lots of records to choose from: phone conversations, emails, text messages, Reno's distaste at being used as a messenger, notes left everywhere but on kitchen counters or on bedsides. They're consummate professionals when they choose to be professional; trained by separation and empire-building, they've come, over the years, to become addicted to accountability and bureaucracy, even – especially – with their personal communiqué. Neither of them, beneath it all, wants to be the one who isn't able to point and say: I told you so.

'He's impossible,' Rufus finally says to Tseng one day, seated at his desk where he is lord and master. Tseng, summoned forth to Rufus' office, stands loose-limbed next to the door and responds to that particular truism with a raised eyebrow. I told you so. Rufus unhooks his laptop from its power source and turns it to face Tseng. 'I'm not talking about his personality. I'm not even talking about his nature. I'm talking about his work ethic.' Spreadsheets – Tseng understands those, if nothing else.

'He has a very good work ethic,' Tseng says. 'Sometimes it's even better than yours.' But he comes forward nonetheless, looking down at numbers that Rufus is achingly sure he already knows by heart. The hunch leaves a stone of cold, heavy anger sitting at the base of Rufus' stomach as he watches Tseng over the lines of choppy, inefficient chronology that maps the lifeline of Balthier's (so-called, one-manned) department. 'I think the inherent problem here,' Tseng concludes, 'is that you're trying to ascribe a sort of geometry to Balthier's actions.' He pauses there, as if it's all he needs to say. Rufus out-waits his silence, which is fair enough a gambit by their standards that Tseng finds himself going on. 'Are you looking for deadlines to be met?'

'Do you know how many people I've had to meet personally these last three months in order to render apologies?' Rufus makes the word "apologies" drip with a kind of acid that he once reserved for use on his father.

When Rufus says people he means people, but Tseng has equal respect for both CEOs and the homeless. 'I'm sure those people have both your number and Balthier's. Were those apologies, Rufus, or commiserations?' There's a hint of a smile dancing on the edge of Tseng's lips.

'You find this funny.' Rufus, using the accusative, turns narrow and patently focused. It makes him resemble, in some ways, a child with both vested interests and investments that pay interest.

'I think that I shouldn't be the one you're talking to,' Tseng says, without really denying anything.

'Talk is less effective than action,' Rufus drawls, too distant to be purely sardonic.

'Maybe he'd listen better on his knees,' Tseng suggests, and the smile doesn't even bother to disguise itself at this point.

It starts because Rufus and Tseng approach communication as a crossword puzzle of associations used in alternative to speech; they're too light on their feet for genuine conversation. In recent days they've become too prone to second-guessing for trust. Something shifts in the air between them, moving out of place as the merry-go-round of their dynamic hits a snare and dislocates. It's like the smell of ozone: sharp, colourless, dangerous and ugly. Rufus pushes his laptop screen shut with a quiet click. 'Is that you,' he asks very slowly, 'attempting to game me?'

'I wouldn't dare to,' Tseng demurs before adding more seriously: 'You're under illusions if you think I've ever managed to get him to work, Rufus. With him it's gambling and games of chance.'

'You're just very good at guessing, I suppose.' Rufus narrows his eyes as their conversation turns into one of their trials by accusation: back and forth until one of them runs out of either reasons or alibis. Neither of them are good at this particular iteration of their relationship; it never fails to devolve into a war of attrition, fought wall to wall until something breaks, dirty and uncouth and full of words like "loyalty" and "obligation." 'I give him legitimacy and he ignores me. But you cheat and he pauses to gawk long enough to be manoeuvred into position?'

'I'm just more discreet when it comes to stacking my decks,' Tseng shoots back at his President. 'What would you rather me do? Yell at him? I'd have to find him, first.'

'So even you can't keep him on a leash.' Rufus' words are turned lazy, vicious and abortive. If he closes his eyes, he could pretend that he's still in Chicago. The thought nauseates him, but only until it makes him smile. There's a stunning thought: maybe he's missed this as much as Tseng has always loathed it. Maybe he's missed making Tseng angry and watching what happens afterwards. Maybe he's missed being able to make Tseng angry at all.

Tseng belays his apparent disinterest with an abbreviated shrug. 'How much would you like this to turn into an argument?'

'We've never been good at being good to each other,' Rufus agrees pleasantly. 'But there's what's private, and then there's what's professional.'

Tseng laughs, harsh. 'There's not that much of a difference in this house, is there?'

'Then perhaps,' Rufus interjects sharply, 'Balthier should be made to realise that when he's a guest in someone else's house, he ought to play by their rules.'

'-- rules.' The word, said in that tone, is a diatribe of incredulity by Tseng's standards, but he's unnaturally stiff beneath the tailored line of his blazer. He's grown into those small luxuries, Rufus realises: the fit, the exactness, the ability to have everything catered to specification, and to his specifications. He listens to Tseng respond as if through a hazy calm, picking out the cracks that the last year has put into Tseng's voice. 'Rules, Rufus? Which – the one that says that any issue you might have with him, be it personal or professional, you fight through me?'

'This isn't about you,' Rufus says peaceable, because he knows Tseng hates his turns of logic. 'This is about your baggage.'

'Balthier's inefficiency is a perfect excuse for you to show him the door.' Tseng spits reason at Rufus like an insult. 'But you aren't; you're laying out a welcome mat. You'd rather start a fight with me instead over – is it my baggage, Rufus? Or yours?'

They both breathe into the silence because to do anything else would be for one of them to do something that they would both regret. They wait for the for the violence of a potential argument to simmer down into impotent, latent anger before speaking again. 'Why do you think he's run this time?' Rufus makes the opening move, watching Tseng wrest control back as if Tseng thinks himself actually physically capable of doing so. Sometimes the two of them walk a fine line between co-operation and the desire to kill each other. 'Because he's happy? He's miserable.'

'When did you start caring about how he feels,' Tseng asks, clipped.

'When did you start letting yourself care at all?'

Tseng turns on his heel, but he finds himself stopping when he hears Rufus speak. 'I didn't care about happiness because happiness, for us, doesn't equate efficiency. Misery, on the other hand, does nothing for Balthier besides distract him. I don't think he'd sit well with happiness either, truth be told, but he needs something, and I intend to give it to him if you don't. Because I want him to be efficient. I want him to be the best he can possibly be. And if you ask me what for,' Rufus says, so very quietly, 'I'll say because I can, because I want him to, because he's one of us now.

'You're afraid of something,' he goes on. 'And I'm beginning to think that it's the same thing that Balthier's afraid of.'

Tseng says nothing. He glances over his shoulder instead, looking through Rufus' barely-shuttered window at the rest of the office. 'I should go before we give them the wrong idea.' Reno is staring, quite unabashed. Rude and Elena are both typing very studiously, most probably because they're typing to each other.

Inside, Rufus spins his laptop around to face him again, stirring the air. He's won. He's won something. 'Why would we ever want to do that,' he murmurs, leaning back in his chair. 'Draw the shutters.'

That makes Tseng pause. 'What?' He looks back at Rufus, at Rufus' too-familiar face, the one he's seen every day for years now, the same and utterly different from the boy he saw off to university and then back again.

'Draw,' Rufus says more slowly, rolling up the cuffs of his pristinely pressed white shirt with his ringed fingers, 'the shutters.'

The sound of the blinds flattening out is loud in the room.

-

'Holy shit,' Reno says into the silence. Then, more reverently. 'Holy shit.'

'I feel like I should be betting on something,' Rude says. 'Except I'm not sure what --' Reno's snicker cuts him off, and Rude swallows. 'I don't want to know, Reno,' he rumbles. 'I really, really don't.'

'Five says it's the boss,' Reno leers.

'Tseng would never,' Elena shakes her head, and then opens her purse. 'So fifty that it's Rufus.'

'I'm going insane,' Rude says to himself.

-

Rufus thinks that if there's one thing to be said about Tseng, it's to be said about his predilection for perversity, and it doesn't take too much effort to extrapolate forward from there. With the slow rise of a diver coming up for air and then the abrupt slap of someone breaking the surface, Rufus remembers with a fervency shared by religion and the truth that he excels at this; that somewhere between then and now he'd forgotten that the best moves are ones made closest to you, the ones that tip the scales with small, harmless betrayals.

Whatever happens in his office stays in his office, but Rufus engineers it well enough that Tseng's obliged to go into the attached bathroom for at least a moment to clean up, and that moment's all that Rufus really needs. Tseng's wallet is tucked very neatly into the very practical back pocket of his very practical black slacks, and the contents thereof of his wallet are equally, well, practical. Rufus hands Tseng his pants afterwards, and when Tseng raises an eyebrow at the gesture Rufus only adds, blithely, that 'The door is, after all, that way,' and jerks his head in the direction of Tseng's (undoubtedly) patient and adoring audience.

Tseng doesn't quite snatch his clothing back. Not quite. 'Why are you doing this?' he stops at the door to ask, back turned to Rufus, all of him reading defeat.

'Doing what?' Rufus asks in return with all the guile of someone who needs no answer for his own actions. But Rufus has learned, through error and failure, how to soothe as easily as he wounds, and he knows that now is the time. His office smells of sex and latex. 'Doing this here you mean?'

'Mixing business with pleasure isn't –' Tseng cuts himself off so that Rufus doesn't have to.

'How I do things? Rufus intercedes softly, finishing Tseng's sentence with aching surety. He wants to get up and put his arms about the edges of Tseng's hips, the angle of his shoulders. He knows he can't; not while Tseng's wearing the armour of his suit and standing equipped with a guilt that's made him more than just inhuman, that's made him superhuman. 'That isn't true,' Rufus says, since he can't touch Tseng. 'I don't do things publicly. I left the door closed, didn't I?' His words are making it worse for Tseng rather than better, even though he meant that as a joke. It's been only ten minutes but Rufus wants to push Tseng up against a wall, press him down and fuck until Tseng can't be either accommodating or infuriating, fuck until Tseng sloughs off the question of what he's done by bringing Balthier into their lives. Mixing, as it were, business with pleasure. Tseng's never been a good hypocrite, in spite of being a good liar.

'May I go,' Tseng asks, his hand on the door, fingers loose, voice raw.

'Would you go without an answer from me?'

'You don't seem to want to give me one.'

Rufus gets up. He crosses the room. He pulls Tseng's hand from the door, bringing his fingers to his lips. Metal always seems so cold, even when warmed by the body.

'Once,' Rufus says, 'we tried playing a game of chess, and we were hysterically bad at it.'

Tseng continues to breathe.

'At least this time,' Rufus goes on, 'we're on the same side.'

Tseng continues to breathe.

'I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do,' Rufus says. 'I'm not going to forewarn you. I'm going to do my worst, which is usually also my best. I am going to be right. I'm going to trust that your choices are your own. I'm not going to be wrong. Go,' he says, and he feels the whole of Tseng's body jerk as if commanded. Rufus pulls Tseng back against all countervailing forces, kisses his mouth, and hugs him. It's too much for sex, and more than one of them is glad that the fit of their bodies together is flaccid and poorly erotic until the moment Tseng finally pulls back, and leaves.

-

Rufus gives himself fifteen minutes before he can think properly again, and when he does he laughs for a while at himself, or maybe at everything.

-

The process of settling Balthier is distinctly more difficult, but if anything about Balthier were actually easy Rufus would check himself in for a psychiatric session, so that's just as well. Rufus goes through the initial drudgery of thinking like a sane person and calling Bunansa companies to make inquiries, but he privately assumes that if Balthier would ever be in possession of a personal assistant, his/her only real skill would be the filing of paperwork and the ability to say no as easily as Balthier does, so Rufus writes off thinking and goes with intuition.

Logic, Rufus' proudest trait, is the bastard child of insanity and contingency. Loosened by emotional catharsis and the last bursts of endorphin running through his system, it doesn't take Rufus long to apply real geometry to Balthier's actions: the position of Manhattan real estate is the function of only several factors: proximity to subway lines, proximity to work, proximity to conveniences and proximity to people of importance. A Google Maps printout, a compass and a few pencil marks later and Rufus narrows his list of hotels down to ten or eleven. He checks the baseline price for long-term occupation on all of them, writes off a few more, pauses to mentally recollect a memory, and then shuts everything down and walks out of the Shinra building dressed to the fucking nines, a single address burned into his memory.

-

'Did you --' Reno motions over his shoulder at Rude.

'Is he --' Elena asks.

'I don't --' Rude says with finality.

'Stop speculating,' Tseng says with an undercurrent of terseness. 'Get back to work.'

'He was wearing colour,' Reno whines. 'You can't do this to me, boss, you can't keep me in suspense like this. I mean, the shoes he was wearing are worth more than my retirement fund--'

Tseng doesn't stop to wonder, as he swaps variables for variables in one of his documents, why they don't notice that something might be actually wrong as opposed to simply awry – why it might have become unreasonable of him to plan reaction after reaction, Rufus against Balthier until his personal life came to resemble a game board with too many pieces and no set rules. He lets the gossip fly over his head by dint of practice, but the words filter through, joke after joke until Tseng is forced to sit back and see that none of them, not Reno nor Elena nor Rude, realise that there's a fine line between crisis and hilarity, and that he doesn't quite know where that line is drawn any more.

It gets hard to breathe.

Tseng pushes his chair back, effectively silencing the room. 'I'm going out.'

Elena opens her mouth, but he gives her a look and she shuts it again and colours, though not precisely with embarrassment. Tseng heads for the elevator, itching for something that is either a smoke or a bad habit, and as the elevator arrives with a quiet ding he hears Reno say from behind his back and with some actual contempt, 'What crawled onto his desk and died?'

Tseng isn't trailing Rufus; he really isn't. So he takes the service exit out of the building, feeling something at the bottom of his stomach that he hasn't felt since Rufus first attempted to take over his father's company and coming to the solid conclusion that he is, actually, afraid.

-

Rufus opts to drive, so his driver appears to meet him at the foot of the building with a selection of keys and an inquiry built into the arch of his brow. 'What do you have?' Rufus asks, settling his cufflinks with an expression on his face that his driver hasn't seen since the last time Rufus decided to take over a small company. Rufus generally doesn't like to be driven; he enjoys the anonymity of New York's streets, and chooses to go where he wants, when he wants, however he wants. Cars are for when Rufus can't abide by the public or has to ply them with his smiles and his looks and his enigmatic silences, and even then he chooses to be understated rather than oblique. He takes slim cars, and slides out of them like a new-generation god that uses his wealth as opposed to eating off the fat of it.

'Well, sir,' his driver begins cautiously. 'Shall I assume that you'll be using my services today? If so, I would not suggest the Lamborghini…'

Rufus would like, by-the-by, to know why he owns a Lambo in New York City, where its nose will undoubtedly scrape against every available inch of road, but his features are schooled into amicable blankness. He supposes that he'd like to know many things about what he owns, or that other people have come to own on his behalf.

'-- so will it be the Rolls, then? Or perhaps the Mercedes?'

'I want to scare people,' Rufus murmurs, shaking out his sleeve. 'Not have them be drawn in closer.'

'Not the German make then,' his driver amends. 'I'm sorry, sir -- I was assuming that you were indulging your usual odd preference for usefulness over glamour.'

'Tonight,' Rufus says, 'Glamour.'

'Well then,' his driver says with some finality, and a not unnoticeable undertone of glee. Rufus, when he opts to do well, does well. 'The Bentley Arnage?'

'Isn't that just a disguised Rolls?'

'A rose by any other name, sir,' his driver reproves.

Rufus considers. 'If it's going to be any night, it's might as well be tonight. Fetch it.'


	2. Management Combined With An Effective Discipline Plan Is The Key

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rufus finds Balthier and proceeds to baffle him.

The hotel's lounge bar is classy like a fist to the face, contrived to deny the sheer mutability of wall paint, surface furnishings, and the transience of contemporary interior design. This, the hotel's lounge bar screams, is the sort of class even you couldn't afford to buy, permanent, undying. A farce.

Rufus scarcely has to scan the crowd to find the relevant motif.

Facing away, Balthier sits by himself, one ankle propped on the opposite knee, a scotch glass with a single ice cube melting into the dregs of a hearty triple. A long mirror on the opposite side of the room shows Rufus that Balthier wears no tie, his shirt unbuttoned two below acceptable for this particular millennium. The bangle around his wrist catches the light as he moves to drink.

Rufus reflects on the mutability of class, aristocracy; in the line of nose, shoulder, cant of hip, knee, leg, Balthier makes of the hotel's lounge bar a mockery.

Balthier knows he draws the eye, even in a crowd. There's safety in being obvious. Small chance of being misread, for example. Tseng could take a lesson or two on the value of obviousness, Balthier thinks, if doubtfully; he's not sure Tseng hasn't already learned his lesson the hard way.

Obviously, there are some things Balthier's not so very proud of being.

Eyes on the mirror image of Rufus on the approach, Balthier licks an eighteen year old Macallan from a flawless icecube.

Standing behind, Rufus rests a gloved hand on Balthier's nape.

'What am I going to do with you?'

'Fuck me until you can forgive me?'

Rufus quirks his lips. 'You don't leave much of an alternative.'

'Sometimes I think you only fuck me when I've fucked up. Do you have a thing for penance? Payment, compensation, fiscal or otherwise? Power, being impossible to separate from your sexual identity, becomes your defining characteristic. What'd they call a man like that, these days?'

'Sir.'

Balthier savours the bitterness. 'Quite.'

Rufus says, 'You haven't answered.'

'What you're going to do with me? Ah, I'm practicing for a role. Being Tseng. I don't think I've got the sheer obfuscation right yet, though. I have this unfortunate tendency to actually answer the question. Eventually.'

Rufus tilts his chin. The light makes him look unforgivably blonde, impossibly foreign, except Balthier's forgotten he's the alien here.

'Speaking of Tseng—'

'Oh, were we?'

'He suggested you might listen better on your knees.'

'Do you know you whimper when you come?'

'You,' Rufus says, 'occasionally say I love you.'

Balthier indicates a wide, hopeless circle with his glass. 'What can I say, I'm incurably romantic.'

A finger flicks, nail chiming against the earrings Balthier wears irrepressibly long. Bemused, Balthier watches in the mirror, through a room full of haze and smoke, and when Rufus moves closer, realises what's happening.

Rufus Shinra is about to sit next to him. Not opposite, not challenging him, or looking at him with those ice-blue, unreadable eyes, across a boardroom table, a chair, a room, a bed (on your back, Balthier, so Rufus can see how he wrecks you), but next to him, in public, and evidently by choice.

'You needn't worry,' Balthier drawls, as a strange panic rises. 'I say it to everyone who ravages me. Occasionally, I commit poetry.'

Then Rufus does sit, his shoulders against the arm Balthier's stretched across the back of the lounge. Balthier clenches his fingers in the cushion, stares ahead, where their reflection is much safer than the reality of Rufus Shinra—in colour?

Balthier blinks, resists the urge to squint. At this distance, he's just a tall Brit taking up too much sofa, Rufus a neat, compact blonde with a ramrod posture to die for. A mirror might lie about that, about them being just anything. It can’t lie about the colour of Rufus Shinra's shirt.

'I get it, you're a double, and Shinra's paid you to keep me entertained. The erratic genius is losing the plot, can't even put together a time-cost analysis without restructuring the entire department in the meantime, seems to be falling apart at the edges, forgetting his personal hygiene, appears wretchedly unhappy; go in, make him feel wanted, and we can all get on with making bloody money.'

Rufus turns, is looking at him. Balthier stares into his own eyes; let Rufus admire his profile and be damned.

Except Rufus leans forward, lips almost on Balthier's ear. His breath comes minty, cool. His finger traces the line of Balthier's sideburn.

'Are you?'

'Am I what?'

'Incurably romantic,' Rufus says. 'Wretchedly unhappy. Possessed of an excess of descriptors. Possessed. Take your pick.'

Laughing, enraged, Balthier heaves away from Shinra, a safe enough distance that he can stare Rufus in the eye without feeling that damned proximity like a weight over his future. 'I fucked a sixteen year old in the cloakroom of a nightclub. What do you fucking think about how I feel?'

'I don't know what I think. All I know is I am thinking about how you feel, and that,' a pause, where Rufus looks almost angry, 'is a first.'

'No doubt your concern's tied to an outcome some business manager drafted for you?'

'I'm aware of what your time-cost spreadsheets indicate.'

'Well done. Had an adjunct read my reports, did you? I wrote such nice abstracts. My father would've been proud.'

'Read your reports,' Rufus agrees. 'I also read several articles in various tabloids featuring your indiscretions. You should really watch out for iPhones.'

'I'm thinking of starting up a rival brand. Without cameras.'

'It'd fail. Have you been in touch with Larsa Solidor recently? Quite a service you provided for him, in those good old days. Remind me, how old was he, those days of your...involvement?'

For a moment, Balthier almost can't believe the words are there, teetering, momentarily; he should have been used to the Shinra brand of multiple assault. 'Never pretended you weren't an arsehole, did you?'

Rufus scarcely lets up, 'Reno's running a betting pool on how many more days you've got within the organisation.'

'Never pretended he wasn't enterprising. What's your bet?'

'Odds on another three and a half years,' Rufus says.

Balthier raises an eyebrow, and considers himself restrained for not raising both.

'I would've put more, but Reno wouldn't go further. Especially considering I've an insider tip.'

'Never pretended you weren't ambitious, Mr Shinra. Why? What could possibly make you think—'

'You still haven't answered me. What am I going to do with you, Balthier? I've invested in you. I bought you, you bastard. I'm not cutting my losses.'

'I'm having a hysterical fit,' Balthier says. 'Can you tell? Tell me about the size of my bar graph, do go on. I'm ever so aroused by market fluctuations. Or maybe just by fucking—'

'Do I actually have to marry you?'

'Dear God, no. No! No. No. The prenup would take volumes. Not to mention, I'm already married.'

Rufus looks puzzled, contemplative, and more than slightly amused, which is far more terrifying than any anger Balthier's seen. 'You're wearing three rings. '

'You're serious. Oh, Jesus. You're fucking serious.'

'I enjoyed our roadtrip to Jersey, you know.'

Balthier wonders what Shinra would do if he indulged the encroaching hysteria. But the hysteria's nothing, really; what worries him is what would happen if the anger came out first.

'By far the best part of that trip was watching you get lost.'

'What,' Rufus says, with the sound of a threat, 'am I going to do with you?'

'If you're serious,' Balthier replies, 'you're going about this the wrong way. How about asking me what I'd like from you?'

Rufus looks at him, steadily.

The blue gaze is too confronting for Balthier's liking, too knowing and old for the impassivity of the face they sit within. In business Rufus never makes moves without knowing the outcome, his risks measured by gains and never losses. What Balthier makes of Rufus' attentive stare both confuses and irritates him.

His own days as parental pawn and Empire's knight well and truly aside, Balthier decides he particularly dislikes being another man's entire gaming board.

As if reading his mind, Rufus says, 'It's Tseng, isn't it?'

Balthier reaches for his jacket, slung haphazard over the bare space next to him. There's a slim silver case of cigarettes in the inside pocket, thin, longer than usual, made, he's long since forgotten to note, in Singapore. He puts one between his lips, pauses, then takes it out.

'Here's something novel. Let's leave Tseng out of the negotiations. We can deal with him later. Joint venture, if you will.'

Astoundingly, Rufus grins, and drops his head as though embarrassed of the expression. He laughs at his lap.

'I'd like that, I think.'

'Tseng won't.'

'Why else do you think I'd like it?'

'Tell me,' Balthier says, 'in the spirit of reconciliation, how you'd feel about letting the whole do you, do me thing slide for a moment, and do something together instead.'

Rufus almost grins again. 'That isn't Tseng?'

'Do you shoot, Rufus Shinra?' Balthier smirks, at Rufus's inquiring eye. 'Because if you don't, I'll demonstrate.'

'Shoot a gun?'

'I notice your absence of bodyguards.'

'I note the absence of yours.'

'Well then. Pertinent gun club membership aside, shall we say revolvers at twenty paces, at dawn?'

'Fortuitously, Balthier, I both have a car and a relevant club membership.'

'You drove?'

'The Bentley,' Rufus says, after a weighted pause.

Well, then. Coloured shirt and lavish status symbol. Rufus was serious.

Still vaguely bemused, Balthier puts the cigarette between his lips, but before he can delve his pockets again, Rufus takes the jacket from slack hands.

Rufus removes the lighter, strikes a flame, and holds it to the end of Balthier's cigarette.


End file.
